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theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the
five-second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.

This would still be handy, there's been plenty of occasions where I've fired off an e-mail and after the window closes I still have the after-image of the text fresh in my mind...and that's when I see the typo/missing attachment.

I even send a correction less than a minute later, but when I hit send/receive and the message goes out, I simultaneously get an e-mail back pointing out my mistake.

Right, I'm pretty sure that's what this feature is for -- correcting the mistakes you inevitably notice just as you hit Send. (Of course, a little discipline about doing a final proof-read would have nearly the same effect.)

In particular if you hit Reply to All when you mean Reply, this is meant to let you recover; I don't guess any amount of proof-reading would help with that.

I think TFS misses the point when it talks about "changing your mind" in that 5-second window. YMMV.

It could be handy for those times when you _accidentally_ hit the send button instead of some other UI button, as has happened to me before.

Thunderbird for one places the address book button right next to the send button (at least on my system) and I've never bothered to change it. Same thing with the dropdown box that lets you choose which address you want to send your email from, which has caused me to send at least one blank email from my personal address to a colleague.

That's not a terrible idea. There have been a number of times that I've sent an email with the body of text saying "here's the report you asked for" and forgot to attach it. which made me feel like an idiot.

Gnome's Evolution optionally warns you if your email contains words like "attachment" (it also seems to apply other heuristics), but no attached file exists. Works surprisingly well.

Some mail clients (well, KMail) scans the message body for words like "attached". If it finds one, and there's no attachment, it pops up a warning like "Did you mean to add an attachment?". Excellent feature, it's just a shame it's so slow to use IMAP with GMail.

That's not a terrible idea. There have been a number of times that I've sent an email with the body of text saying "here's the report you asked for" and forgot to attach it. which made me feel like an idiot.

You can avoid that from happening ever again. And it's very simple:

Before you write any sentence mentioning an attachment, attach the file first.

Same goes for important mail. When writing a job application, finish the email first, then add the recipient address last.

Some people can barely react in that time. Although I can appreciate that a pop-up should not last longer, would a settable delay of 1-10 minutes really kill the medium? Perhaps with a "Send now" option on pending emails for urgent communication.

I personally added a "Delay Sending by One Minute" rule into Outlook at work. It saves me a lot of embarassment when I hit send without adding my attachments (happens a lot). I wouldn't mind a similar gmail holding pen.

I wonder if there is some technical limitation, so they set this 5 second limit.

Storing the pending mail on the client side with Javascript would explain it. The mail can be delayed for 5 seconds safely there before sending. It's not likely anything bad happens in that particular 5 seconds.

If the mail does get to the server side then it is not clear why they used only a 5 second delay which is far too short. It could be a killer feature with a delay of, say, 5 minutes.

FYI the 2 minute delays was the "slow down cowboy" period for posting a successive message.

And it was easily the stupidest feature of the slashcode ever incorporated. For legit users(ie non-trolls) it punished fast readers & fast typists. I utterly despised that feature. It's like a reverse dead man switch(which dead man switches are all over the place on the web).

{Galaxy Quest}(Paraphrased)"What's the Omega 13?""Opinions vary. Some think it's a doomsday device. But I think it rolls back time.""What do you mean?""13 seconds is enough time to fix one costly mistake"

I use Thunderbird, which has an "are you sure you want to send?" confirmation by default. Since I use the ctrl-return hot key to send, I usually just blast through this message so at one stage, I switched it off.

However, I found that in the half second between pressing ctrl-return and return to confirm, my brain was actually doing some checking to make sure I should send that message.

I sent a reply to a whole message board asking for more information about a job - not a disaster, but not what I had intended. I realised almost as soon as I had hit the button, but I'd switched off the confirmation by this point. I rapidly switched it back on. Since then, I've noticed quite a few occasions on which I've hit ctrl-return and then realised I should tweak my message in some way before I send it.

In conclusion: 5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it could make all the difference.

Generally, if you are stupid enough to send a flaming email to your boss without a serious desire to quit that predates your immediate rage, 5 seconds won't be enough. For every boss that is so bad they'd make a saint froth at the mouth like someone with Tourrette's, there are 20 cases where the employee who does that is just being an immature douchebag. For those people, 5 seconds won't be anywhere near enough time to come to the realization that they just shot their employment in the back of the head, and

There are other reasons why you'd want to recall a message sent to your boss.

Say, you forgot to attach the required document. Or you realized you made a typo in dollar amount. Or you forgot to copy someone important on the message (and because of CYA or whatever, your boss needs to see that you cc:ed the person).

At least once a month I send an email I wish I could recall, because I would have liked to have made a small change... and instead I end up sending a followup email, which is just unwieldy and annoying.

I think this is a great feature. It has happened to me lots of time. Forget to add an attachment or forget to add an other statement or something and you remember about that as soon as you sent it This way it helps quite a lot of folks like me. But 5 seconds is a shot time I hope they up it to 10 seconds to give slow responders like me to turn around and stop the damn send.

I know more than once I've fired off an email (or made a post in say...a forum somewhere, ahem...) and twitched a second later saying NO thats NOT what I meant to do!

For example, 30 seconds ago I accidentally modded a comment here Offtopic when I intended to mod it Insightful. So here I am doing the next best thing to Undo... posting to undo my errant moderation. Guess slashdot could use some Undo too eh? Too bad there's no similar trick for email.

If you use Outlook and Exchange, there is a message recall feature [microsoft.com]. Of course, for those who don't, we just get an annoying two line email saying "Foo would like to recall message blah". Even funnier is that in French, the word they use for recall can mean either of recall or highlight/remind.

It took me a while to understand why some senders always wanted to remind me of some silly email.

A popup. How lame, lazy, and dangerous: (I realize it's an optional setting)

- First, it's NOT undo... this is a delay tactic. A real undo would have the system hold the mail in your "outbox" for a user customizable time, from where you can snatch it, but only when you need to.

- Second, you now have to wait, EVERY time you send an email. Because "email regret" happens only now and then, it's likely to get turned off. Back to square one.

- Third, if there ever was a "Send now" button, you'll get so customized

A spanish blog I read blogged [infames.org] about this... three years ago. And it is freakish that he posted a screenshot of how this should look like, and Google have implemented this in that exact way.

I am a big Google Labs user. I think they have a few really excellent little toys. Then there are others that are rubbish, but I like to focus on the good things in life:)

Anyhow, the 5 second delay is just perfect for me. I am an emotional person, I admit. I have often sent an e-mail and regretted it the next second. 5 seconds sounds about right for me to change my mind.

Another labs I use is the "notify of missing attachment". That's pure gold - basically, if I mention attachments in my e-mail, but don't p

Whenever I replies to/writes a sensitive or important email, I clear the To/Cc fields, completely, and only add the addresses just before I'm sending.... This, of course, should be after I've proofread it several times, and preferable waited a day:-)

I used to work for a company where The Managing Director frequently used to send (usually offensive) emails to the wrong people by accident. His usual error was to insult someone behind their back and accidentally include them in the cc field!

Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!

At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!

Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!

At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!

It occurs to me that if you laid the Ethernet cable for the mail server across those stairs you could allow him to accomplish his goal of preventing the mail from going out while providing endless amounts of humor for the rest of the office;)

That reminds me of a company I used to work for. A woman there, usually very kind and agreeable, was fed up with one of her contacts feeding her a lot of excuses why he wasn't able to make a deadline for the 3rd time. She thought she forwarded a nice e-mail to her manager containing some very choice words expressing her opinion that matter.

Oh how quickly that send button was smashed without carefully verifying who was in the To field, only to discover that instead of forward she had pressed reply to all. When the deed was done and the mailserver had delivered her incredibly inflammatory experiment in vocabulary she stood at my desk nearly in tears asking me if I could stop her mail from reaching its destination.

Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.

Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.

The option to retract messages as implemented in Outlook isn't a bad idea, really, but I still hate it for the false impression it creates. I've seen it happen enough that some user becomes familiar with the feature and then comes under the impression that it actually allows them to rescind email messages at will, regardless of the circumstances. I've even had a couple users get angry with me-- as though I had the email server configured incorrectly-- because, after having sent the message over the Intern

I used to work for a company where The Managing Director frequently used to send (usually offensive) emails to the wrong people by accident. His usual error was to insult someone behind their back and accidentally include them in the cc field!

Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!

At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!

So, what part of Dilbert's company did you work in? How incompetent was this managing director?

It happens more often than you think. I've had plenty of times when I've clicked send and almost instantaneously realized I had a mistake in the email. This will save me from having to immediately reply to my own email to make that correction, thus looking like a fool (I have plenty of other ways to make myself look like a fool, thank you very much).

Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.

Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.

I thought Slashdot already had an article on this feature. It's called Mail Goggles [blogspot.com]. It won't stop you from sending the email, but it may slow you down.

Measure twice, cut once. Seriously now, don't send stuff out you're not prepared to send! Maybe instead of a 5 second send rule they should just add an annoying "Are you SURE you want to send this message?" verification box. 5 seconds isn't enough to doublecheck a message... they should maybe let you queue it up for 5 minutes which would be more useful.

We use Outlook/Exchange. It had a message recall button, but the function wasn't enabled. Which meant about once a week you could see a message with a followup THAT ASKED THE READER if the previous message could be recalled. Even if you said yes (after reading the mistaken message of course) the bad message did not disappear.

This worked great a flag for screwed up mail to be read first. Thanks Microsoft!

Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.

Just don't turn the PC on when you get home at 3am. Once I worked that one out, I had much better mornings after -- mostly because I'd not spent an hour (or more) messing about on the web after returning home late, and was asleep by 3.15 rather than 4.45.

I primarily use Thunderbird for work email. There is an option to confirm before sending (much in the manner of Vista's UAC "Are you sure?" windows) that most people disable. I leave it enabled and find myself saying "no, I'm not sure" at least once per week.

I think their Gmail Goggles option that makes you do maths before sending an Email is a better idea as not only does it make sure you are compos mentis but also it's slightly educational (or at least keeps the grey matter on it's toes)

How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.

Sometimes when I want to type an "A" I end up hitting TAB (french keyboard). If I'm at the end of a word, and I'm not paying attention to what's on screen, I'll hit space while the focus is on the "Send" button, and the email will be sent.

You must not have a small child. I get a lot of/sending before the sentence is done/ problems due to my daughter hitting the send button for me.

Having small children requires a lot of quick responses to unexpected events. Yesterday, while I innocently sat coding, my daughter gave me a gooey handful of cat poop she found somewhere. After a quick exercise in emergency bathing my wife and I cleaned/searched the house and were unable to figure out where she managed to find this special gift at. The joys of par